Standard Product Models for Supporting Automated Erection of Structural Steelwork

A piece of automation equipment such as a robotic crane for steel erection has no intrinsic knowledge of the process it automates. Thus, geometric and spatial information about a component such as a steel member, and the motion sequences that must be executed to move that component from a staging area to its installed final location must both be programmed into the equipment. In automated steel construction, the position and orientation of steel members in a temporary staging area is project and site dependent, and thus cannot be automatically determined beforehand. The final in-place spatial configuration (position and orientation) of a steel member, however, can be conceptually extracted automatically from a product model of the structure being erected. The presented research evaluates this hypothesis and investigates the extent to which the CIMsteel Integration Standards (CIS/2) can specify product descriptions capable of supporting automated erection of structural steelwork.